 Ocean's first book, The Most Beautiful Rot, was just published like last month, or a couple months ago. She's currently working on her second book. Please welcome Ocean Capewell. The Most Beautiful Rot, it's a saga of a super messy punk house told from the point of view of four housemates. It initially started as a four page story, cautionary tale to my girlfriend at the time who wouldn't turn her compost pile. And it turned into a novel and it's in my hands right here and I'm gonna read something. It's a little bit sexy. I hope you guys can handle it. If not, you can always feel free to take a break. I won't be offended. So this is narrated by Lydia who is the chubby fam Latina social worker housemate. And this is part of her story. A few days later, it was a Sunday afternoon and a very stereotypical one at that. Gray, boring and nothing seemed quite right. Reading was pointless. I couldn't stand any of my friends and I didn't have anything to knit. Perhaps a good wank would distract me but I was stuck and obsessing about how dirty my sex toys were. They'd all been washed off beforehand. A quick rinse under the bathroom tap but there's only so much that washing can do. Every so often it's a good idea to sterilize the whole arsenal, you know. Who knew what germs were hanging out on Silicon Island? We didn't give my partners or me a nasty case of bacterial vaginosis. And so I boiled a cauldron of water in the kitchen tapping my nails on the counter with my pink polka dotted sex toy satchel next to me. When the water started steaming, I unceremoniously dumped the whole gang into the pot. A few droplets of water splashed by forearms but I hardly felt the burn. This house annoys the hell out of me usually. Sometimes I almost forget that I have money now, that I get a paycheck every other week that's in the quadruple digits and I don't have to put up with the shit anymore just because I'm broke. All the messes and drama, the hurt feelings, the leftovers eaten without permission. But I stay and part of the reason why is because here I'm free to do whatever the hell I want all the time. Stand on the kitchen table and scream, fling a dumpster, cream pie at the wall and turn to Tabitha's face and sterilize my sex toys in the middle of the kitchen in the middle of the day. The big blue cock was poking its head out over the water and I flicked it down with the tip of my finger. The smaller burnished gold colored one was safely underwater and my hot pink butt plug floated lazily. I stirred them with the tongs and thought sadly about how Jasmine referred to this whole process as making dildo soup. She'd bound in when I was doing this and yells in like, making dildo soup for me, oh you're so sweet. It's weird how much little things can hurt. I felt an ache as if she were already gone like it was impossible for her to ever joke about my sex toy cleaning habits ever again. The first night I realized Jasmine was going to die, I wailed in her face but it didn't make me feel any better. Then I went out with my old friends Laurel and Pony Boy and danced my ass off, shook my cleavage all up in strangers' faces, drank whiskey sour after whiskey sour but I still didn't feel any better. I wound up fucking Pony Boy just to ask something to do because besides going to my bed alone and crying some more. Pony Boy is a gorgeous boy, Dyke. Gender neutral pronouns, utilizer of the hanky code. Skinny ass they know how to shake. They're always after me but I usually like to keep them at bay. They're too awkward for me to fall in love with, too apologetic, too scared, too different from the picture I have in my mind from the person I want. I'm thinking more like a tall brown woman with long, wild, black hair who can make long, charming cry with her bad attitude and who can make academics wins with their perfectly pointy analyses. Not Pony Boy, pale and college educated in a stoned way and smiling lazily with a paragraphs long gender identity with insignificant thighs and a flat ass hidden under corduroys from the little boy section at the thrift store. Not another skinny white girl boy who doesn't quite feel like home to me. Please, please, not another one. But politics be damned, I went for Pony that night because I knew they were an easy lay and I needed something to be easy. It was pretty hot climbing into their bunk bed, drunk and sweaty from dancing all night, pinching their nipple underneath layers and layers of T-shirts and binders. Pretty hot making out underneath them. Their thigh grinding against my clit and my hand tangled in the greasy curls in their head as if I yanked hard enough I could drag them off into the land of sex. Almost hot enough to distract me, almost. We rolled around as much as we could on the twin-sized bunk bed. Having sex on the top bunk, even really vanilla sex, feels a little more exciting because it seems like at any second you and your lover could tumble off the edge and land in a tangled heap on the carpet. And imagine if someone was in the bunk below, whoa, that would be hot. But the only thing in the lower bunk was Pony's bass guitar slumbering peacefully. And despite their multicolored hanky collection, Pony's just about as vanilla as anyone can be. But that's okay because fucking on top of this rickety frame was just about all the excitement I could take right now. I wrenched my mouth away from our hot kiss and stuck it at the base in their neck. My teeth latched on and I gave them the angriest roaring tiger of a hickey. I love giving hickeys to the people I sleep with, something that will make them blush and work the next morning, something that will make their playful coworkers go, ooh, you got laid. And their unplayful coworkers shake their heads and mute disapproval. Something small and darkened in her face just like me to remember me by. I loved bumping into them around town, seeing it fade from the neck gradually. Various stages of healing, purple, puke, green, and yellowy. When I was sucking on their neck, they let out a guttural growl, shifting their bodies so their knee was no longer in my crotch. Pony pushed my dress up and ran their hand along my bare thigh, pausing for a moment at my damp undergarments. Is this okay? I responded enthusiastically and they pushed my undies aside and ran their finger just inside me looking for my clit. It's right where it usually is. Their fingers circled around it and my breathing got faster. It felt so good I pulled Pony's hair even harder. They wriggled down my body so they could push their face in between my thighs and lap away. And at an especially delicious moment, they stopped and took off their pants and boxers. Pony flipped over and put their knees next to my ears and slowly lowered their wet cunt close to my face. I knew from previous encounters that they didn't take their shirt off during sex, but they were totally fine with any below the belt action unless they asked me to stop. I'm always fine with that sort of thing. Gonna skip for a little bit. I came in roommate unfriendly waves screaming like I was being murdered. My face and right hand still slicked from their posse. They went to how loud I was being but didn't stop fucking me, thank goddess. After I was done, Pony and Boy dropped their half-naked body on top of mine and held me through the aftershocks. Warm and cozy, almost like we were partners instead of weird, sexually tense friends. So warm and cozy that I started crying again. What's wrong, they asked. Jasmine, I sobbed. She's going to die, I choked out. Pony Boy was Jasmine's friend before I was. They'd been in our house a lot over the last few days. They knew what was going on. They said smoothing my hair like a mom in a cough syrup commercial. You don't know that. Even the doctors don't know that. We just have to wait and see. I pulled away and looked at them with a look of utter horror. Fuck you, I spat and smacked them right across the face. They looked at me like a stepped on puppy and I realized that I'd gone too far. But I don't know how to take things back and I don't like saying I'm sorry. So there's nothing else to do besides leap out of their bed, not even bothering with the bunk bed ladder. Landing on the floor super hard, I tried to pretend that it didn't hurt. I found my shoes in my bag somehow and ran out the door into my car where I cried and cried and cried some more as the sun rose until it was time to go to work looking like hell and feeling like shit. Things have been kind of tense with Pony and me ever since then. They don't call me anymore and they only meet my eyes halfway whenever we bump into each other. Their hickey was immediately covered up with a bandana around their neck. I don't know how to tell them Jasmine and I know each other like two little babies sucking on the same unbilical cords do. That when one side starts to fade, the other side feels it acutely. The other one does everything she can to make it stop even when she knows there's no stopping it. I don't know how to tell Pony that I slapped them because I was jealous they didn't know, jealous they lived in that comfortable ignorance and I wanted to snack them out of it and I'm sorry, I really am but I don't know how to tell them. And so I store my sex toys in their boiling bath, nobody to use them on, thinking about all those hundreds and hundreds of days laying around the house with Jasmine, bored and silly, all the stupid times we've had, wishing so badly she would come back, walk through the door and say something, anything. Instead, Tabitha came tromping into the kitchen. She peered in the pot to see what I was making and flinched a little but also kind of chuckled too. My fancier friends are always looking for roommates and I know some of them live in cutely decorated clean apartments but I also know they get whiny about boiling sex toys in the kitchen during daylight hours. I'd have to sneak around like a drug addict, making dildo soup in the middle of the night while my roommate slumbered, didn't sound like any kind of life I'm interested in living. And I'm gonna stop there, thank you for listening. Thank you Ocean Capewell. Ocean has copies of the book with her so we'll stop a little bit early so you can do some book shopping. Thank you also for wearing leggings with french fries on them.